PHILADELPHIA — Nostalgia for the 1990s is so back! The Mets are running back Generation K, and at an interesting time. As it stands, their playoff rotation could include three pitchers who were in the minors in mid-August: Nolan McLean, Brandon Sproat, and Jonah Tong. At least, all three should figure somewhere on the postseason roster, should the Mets stop playing with their food and sew up the playoff berth they’ve had a hand on all season.
I’m old enough to remember the 90s the first time around — an era of flared jeans and futurism, much of which was rebadged 1960s nostalgia. Not least in Mets pitching prospects, when Bill Pulsipher, Paul Wilson, and Jason Isringhausen were viewed as the second coming of Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Gary Gentry and/or Nolan Ryan.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Tong is a rare right-handed starting pitcher who could accurately be described as “little.” He’s listed at 6-foot-1, 180 pounds, which, I dunno, maybe the floor of the visiting clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park is crooked and I was standing uphill from Tong when we talked.
Despite his slight frame and short levers, Tong has a big fastball. Its average velocity is within a rounding error of 96 mph, and he’s hit 98 both at Triple-A and in the majors. He is an explosive, bendy athlete whose windup features a sharp downward arm stab and a cartwheeling throwing motion that gives him terrific extension and one of the highest arm angles in the league.
I know what you’re thinking: He looks like Tim Lincecum, down to the head lean and tufts of straight black hair sticking out from the back of his cap.
I wanted to get the Linecum comparison out of the way because, even accounting for the various ways the game has changed over the past 15 years, Tong is quite a different pitcher. Lincecum threw a sinker and one of the best changeups of his generation. Tong’s best pitch is a four-seamer that, in addition to above-average velocity, comes with hilarious rise.
Eleven innings into his big league career, Tong’s fastball is coming in with less than 10 inches of drop. Taking velocity into account (faster pitches have less time to fall due to gravity), Tong gets about four inches of extra “rise” on his four-seamer than average. If he had enough playing time to qualify, both of those numbers would be among the best in the league.
How’s he doing it?
“I wish I knew,” Tong said. “Obviously, my arm slot is a big factor. Again, I wish I could tell you more, but from what I understand from the analytical background, I’m spinning the ball on a good axis.”
Let’s go with that. Tong’s four-seamer has an observed spin axis of 12:15, according to Baseball Savant, which measures spin direction using the face of a clock. That means his four-seamer has close-to-perfect backspin, placing him in a rare group of pitchers. Tyler Glasnow has a similar arm angle and spin axis, but his fastball has more cut and less rise. Nick Pivetta’s heater has similar movement, but lower velocity.
I found seven four-seamers that have been thrown 100 or more times this year with the following characteristics: at least 17 inches of IVB, no more than five inches of arm-side run, an average velocity of 95 mph, and an average arm angle of 55 degrees or higher.
The Most Tonglike Fastballs
Source: Baseball Savant
That’s a pretty select group, and Tong is clear at the top in terms of rise and arm angle. I wrote about Cristian Javier last week, and while these are two completely different pitchers in terms of arm angle, velocity, extension, and overall stuff, the fastball movement is pretty similar.
When you can throw hard, with a lot of rise and a little cut, hitters will tie themselves in knots. The most obvious application is climbing the ladder to get a whiff, much to the peril of Gavin Lux.
But apparently you can also put up a staggering groundball rate. In 22 minor league starts this year, Tong struck out 40.5% of the batters he faced, which is absolutely outrageous, even in the minors. When his opponents did put the ball in play, however, they put it on the ground 52.9% of the time, which is absolutely not what one would expect for a pitcher with Tong’s four-seamer movement and no secondary fastball whatsoever.
This surprised Tong as well; he said he didn’t realize he was putting up Framber Valdez-level groundball rates until someone told him about it. But once he had that information, he was able to put together a theory.
“At times, it felt like hitters always had to be on the heater, so any offspeed pitch I threw they were going to be over the top of it,” he said.
So let’s talk about Tong’s two most common secondary pitches. The first is a beautiful upper-70s 12-to-6 curveball, the kind of pitch that makes me think the Lincecum comp is invoking the wrong crunchy early-2010s Giants starter. Because this is some Barry Zito action.
On a base level, I don’t care if this pitch is effective or not, I need Tong to keep throwing it just because it’s so pretty.
And despite a velocity difference of almost 18 mph between heater and hook, and a difference of almost five feet in vertical movement, Tong says he doesn’t have any trouble commanding the two pitches or keeping hitters off-balance.
“I think that’s the beauty of the north-south approach, that everything’s coming out of the same spot,” he said.
The north-south approach is one of the things that makes Tong interesting, since these two pitches — despite speeds and vertical movements that could not be more different — exist more or less in the same horizontal plane. His curveball averages less than five inches of induced glove-side break. Taken with the fastball, it’s like he is asking hitters to hit a specific point on a very long, very thin vertical pole. Sounds easy, except the hitter doesn’t know when the ball is going to arrive, or whether it’s going to come in at his ankles or right up under his eyebrows.
The pitch that makes or breaks Tong might end up being his changeup, which — like everything else — has below-average horizontal movement, but it also has much more arm-side run than his fastball. About 10 inches more, in fact, which is significant.
This is the pitch Tong thinks hitters kept beating into the ground in the minors, and while the added horizontal movement helps, he says the speed differential is the key to the pitch.
“The whole point of a changeup is to be slower than your fastball,” Tong said. “I’ve had a changeup before where it was 10 to 11 mph off. It was just as effective, just maybe slightly different. I think, as a general rule of thumb, 10 mph slower [is where you want to be].”
What’s he throwing now? A Vulcan change that he learned, believe it or not, off Instagram. (The best thing I ever got off Instagram was a t-shirt with a picture of a chimpanzee in a spacesuit on it.)
This one’s coming in a little harder — the speed differential is 9.4 mph — but it’s close enough. More important, it’s getting what Eric Longenhagen called “huge screwball action,” in the most recent Mets top prospect list. In addition to the velocity differential and the glove-side movement, Tong’s bottle rocket-action fastball leaves tons of space for him to drop the changeup under opponents’ bats.
Getting such different velocity and movement — in both planes, at the same time — out of the same tunnel is tough. More than 100 pitchers have thrown at least 250 four-seamers, at least 100 changeups, and at least 1,000 total pitches this year. Only four have an average separation between fastball and changeup of at least nine mph, nine inches of IVB, and nine inches of horizontal movement. Those four pitchers: Sean Burke, Valente Bellozo (bear with me, it gets better), Tarik Skubal, and Max Fried.
That’s more like it.
There are still some bumps in Tong’s game to iron out. He walked 10.6% of opponents in the minors this year, which is higher than you’d want from a frontline starter. He also let up three home runs to the Reds in his last start, which is why is career FIP at the moment is a rather ugly 5.60. Better pitchers than Tong will get lit up at Great American Ball Park, and two of those homers came on pitches that were at or above the top edge of the zone, but home runs are a comorbidity of living on the high fastball.
Nevertheless, Tong and his buddies are all in the Mets rotation during the stretch run, and could have their team’s season in their collective hands. The Mets just let the Giants and Reds back into the Wild Card race by getting swept over a four-game series in Philadelphia, but the only rookie to start during that series was McLean, who was terrific in a 1-0 loss to Aaron Nola on Monday.
The idea of the Mets going with an all- or mostly-rookie playoff rotation seems a little farfetched, and Tong knows that in all likelihood he’s competing for a job against two of his friends from the minors: Sproat and McLean. But he says he’s not bothered by that prospect.
“The competition side of it is something I don’t really look at, honestly,” he said. “The best way to describe it is it’s not worth looking into… I’m just really excited to see good friends of mine go out there, compete, and have fun. And it’s nice having people you came up with in the same spot as you, and all experiencing it together for the first time.”
As for the pressure of making it in the majors, let alone in New York, in a pennant race, Tong brought up something Sproat said when he was getting promoted through the upper minors.
“Hitters don’t really change,” Tong said. “Their approaches might get a little bit more refined up here, but the onus is still on us as pitchers to go out and execute. I think when you think like that, it kind of makes the game a little bit easier on your end.”
Tong is going to need any edge he can get as he takes the mound on Friday night against the Rangers. Not only have the Mets dropped six straight to direct playoff rivals, the opposing starting pitcher will be none other than Jacob deGrom, in his first start at Citi Field since his divorce from the Mets three years ago.
The stakes could not be higher, and the stage will not be bigger. We’ll see what this talented rookie is made of.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com